I should probably start this off by confessing that I’ve never read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, nor have I ever seen a production of it. So there may well be references in Ava Reid’s re-telling that I missed. That said, I’m familiar with the plot points and the characters and I read the Wikipedia article once I started listening to Lady Macbeth.
Reid takes the well-known (even if you haven’t read it) Scottish story of Macbeth and retells it, placing Lady Macbeth at the centre. Here she is Roscille, the daughter of a duke from the Loire valley, only 17-years-old and sent to Alba to be married to a Scottish lord she has never met. She finds herself in a rough and cold castle, surrounded by men. And her new lord husband has a dark secret buried in his castle.
But Roscille is not entirely innocent or naive. She is known as witch-touched, or cursed, and it is said that a glance of her eyes can drive men mad. Because of this, she goes veiled everywhere and many are terrified of her, although her new husband seems to see her curse as a point for his own pride. As well, Roscille is smart and observant and quickly works to strengthen her position in her husband’s court. So when Macbeth reveals his secret to her, she also works to make the prophecies come true.
Okay, here are my thoughts and there are spoilers here:
I did not really enjoy this book. It was the sort of fluff book that I did want to find out what happens but I didn’t feel like the process of getting there was much benefitting me. Partly that may have been because the book is pretty gory in parts and partly because it felt like, for such a short book, it had a lot of repetition.
I know that sexy dragons are kind of a trend right now but the source material here is Shakespeare! Shakespeare’s does not need sexy dragons added to it! For me, the addition of this weird love interest cheapened Roscille’s own story and took away some of the agency that the book seemed to be trying to give her.
Along the same vein, with the addition of a dragon and Lady Macbeth having witch powers, it had a sort of deux ex machina result. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the ordinary fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies (when the wood comes to the castle, no man of woman born, etc.) is, to my mind, actually more powerful. The prophecy isn’t wrong but Macbeth takes it to mean something it doesn’t. Here Macbeth takes its meaning in the same way but the prophecy actually only can be fulfilled by the supernatural. (Though I have to admit that the “Surprise! My mom had a c-section!” ending of Shakespeare’s version makes me laugh.)
This is the sort of book that gets marketed as a “feminist retelling” of a classic story. Which got me thinking if this truly qualified. Does feminist retelling simply mean the centering of a female character who is sidelined in the original? If so, this could qualify, even though my sense of Macbeth has always been that Lady Macbeth is a fairly powerful character. Does it matter here that Roscille is kind of actually pretty evil in the end and is only kind of the one who rescues herself? That doesn’t feel empowering but does a feminist retelling need to feel empowering? Is it, perhaps, empowering for women to also be the agents of their own undoing and the destruction of those around them? I think where it came closest for me was that in the final quarter of the book there starts to be an emphasis on female relationship and the power of women who work together. I wish there had been more of that throughout the story though.
I listened to this on audio and narrator Imani Jade Powers does a great job. I had to look up how to spell all sorts of things, including Roscille’s name. Power’s narration adds a lot more depth to the characters, emphasizing their accents and therefore the very different backgrounds of various characters.
Karissa Reads Books 
“Shakespeare does not need sexy dragons added to it!” made me laugh. In February I went to see Jamie Lloyd’s shiny new staging of Much Ado About Nothing (which is my very favourite play, and which I’d never seen live before. Also, it had Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in it. I had great hopes). This is basically how I felt when I left! I have seen some contemporary stagings of Shakespeare that I really love, but in this production it snowed acid pink confetti the whole time, there were a bunch of 90s disco musical numbers, a completely unnecessary sex scene during which the two characters were wearing giant toy animal heads, cardboard cutouts of Atwell and Hiddleston in their Marvel roles, dry ice being constantly piped into the audience… you get the drift. (They also made a bunch of changes to the script). I’m fascinated by whatever thought process that leads people to feel they need to jazz up *Shakespeare*, of all writers, in that way…
Oh no! That sounds terrible! I think retellings of Shakespeare can be really interesting, like a modern setting can bring it to a new audience. But you don’t need to glitz it up! It’s Shakespeare!
I guess if we’re using the most basic definition of “feminist,” it means equality for all genders. Therefore, letting a woman have the center of the story makes her equal to a man being the center of the story. That being said, I think folks commonly want something inspiring, showing women being leaders or heroes or some kind. That, to me, is unrealistic.
Thinking over it now, having a female character be flawed and villainous is pretty feminist. She’s not delicate or angelic or pure. She’s supposed to be as dangerous as any man and more dangerous than Macbeth in the end. I think where the feminist part felt flawed to me is that I know she was supposed to be powerful but it didn’t quite come across that way for me. She has this power to bewitch men with her eyes but can never quite get her veil off in time to actually do it, for example. So she’s not heroic (because she’s fairly cruel in the end) but she’s also still a character where things kind of just happen to her a lot.
“She has this power to bewitch men with her eyes but can never quite get her veil off in time to actually do it, for example.” — okay, this novel just turned into an absolute black comedy for me.
That would be far more interesting!
Hmmm your question about what makes a text feminist is an interesting one. Like Melanie above I would also lean on the ‘equality’ definition, so if a woman is the undoing of herself and others, at least she’s being treated with the same agency as men. Is this empowering? Probably, based on who you ask haha
I think we’re used to female empowerment in media looking like women being the hero of the story. That’s not really the case here so it feels off-putting. But Roscille maybe being the true villain is equal opportunity!
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